Many Such Takes: Conversation with Nicholas Decker, Lib Qanon, The List, 1965

The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free (and an extra audio interview with Nicholas Decker)

Welcome to Many Such Takes! For those unfamiliar, this is a free weekly segment (I also do lots of other stuff!) For Many Such Takes, I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter (and now BlueSky) discourse so you don’t have to. If you see yourself featured here and you don’t like it, simply send me a Twitter reply or leave a comment here and I will delete whatever it is you said.

A Conversation with Nicholas Decker

As many of you know, I have a podcast now. I’m still figuring out how to incorporate it because I know people primarily follow this Substack for written content. So I’m experimenting with something new, given that I had a conversation with Substack writer and chaotic Twitter user

Nicholas Decker

a little while back—apologies if some of our topics are a few weeks old. I’m adding it as embedded audio below to see if this format works better for you guys, and because we talked about some topics that aren’t the standard CHH themes, as well as some that are—let me know what you think! Also, subscribe to him here!

Lib Qanon

This week, the Department of Homeland Security did something very cheeky by tweeting a fourteen-word tweet with two capitalized H’s. This is a Nazi dogwhistle that basically anyone with an understanding of online groypers could understand, but I don’t think they really care.

Grok, who has since shed his Mecha Hitler identity, is back on the side of reason:

Basically, I feel like this is the liberal version of Qanon, except it’s actually true that a cabal of elite pedophiles (or, well, ephebophiles, akshually) is covering up a scandal while inserting secret messages into its communications. I know we sound like the crazy people with the newspaper clippings on the wall, but the difference is that we’re actually right. Speaking of which…

The List

I haven’t been following this one as closely as I should because I feel like it’s yet another “I’d like to see ol’ Donny wriggle out of this one!” moment, but apparently Trump is “in the Epstein files.” To be honest, I’ve mostly been under the impression that the Epstein “files,” as it were, never existed and were paraded around by Trump’s team to make it look like they were doing something. But maybe not??

The main reason I started thinking that maybe the Epstein files were real was the fact that all the right-wing accounts started claiming it was no big deal to be in them. Uh oh!

Then I noticed a Wall Street Journal headline about Trump being informed that he was in the “Epstein files.” So I guess it’s real? But alas, maybe it’s not a big deal and Trump, who apparently doesn’t have any money of his own, just wanted some free plane rides:

I don’t even know what this is about:

This all comes off the heels of the news breaking that Trump gifted Jeffrey Epstein a “bawdy doodle” for his fiftieth birthday. Honestly, I wasn’t prepared for the artistry of the doodle but it’s not bad. I mean, the signature as pubic hair? Genius. Why couldn’t he have stuck to art and stayed out of politics?

1965

While I like to think I’m pretty up to date with what the cool youngsters are doing, today I discovered that a singer named Jessie Murph exists. She performed one of her songs, 1965, on The Tonight Show. And the denizens of Twitter weren’t happy about it.

The clip included the line, “I think I’d give up a few rights if you would just love me like it’s 1965” which immediately put people on edge:

It did for me too, so I decided to watch the whole music video and read all the lyrics. Heads up: the music video contains a jumpscare of sorts where two people are literally just fucking. But anyway, the song would only be MAGA propaganda for someone with pretty bad media literacy. The general idea is that men still treat women so badly that it’s no better than 1965, for example, the obviously satirical line like: “Maybe you’d still be a ho, but if you cheated I wouldn’t know.” The song also contains the word “fuck” directed at a man, far too many times for it to be trad-anything, but it also makes pretty offensive parallels between hitting your wife and being horny on Snapchat, so who’s to say.

I will take specific issue with one lyric, which is when she says that in 1965 it would have been normal for her to be twenty and for her husband to be forty. I feel like I wouldn’t be CHH if I didn’t jump in on this: in 1965, just as today, the average married couple was only a few years apart (20.6 for women and 22.8 for men.) Age gap relationships existed, but they weren’t significantly more common than they are now, and they certainly weren’t the standard. Sorry, I had to point this out! Anyway, let’s go back to the discourse:

I guess here’s my verdict: while I’m not offended by the music video and while I got what she was trying to do, it feels like most people don’t, and therefore it’s probably not very good satire? Even if it’s not the intention, if 99% of people think you’re doing antifeminist propaganda then the effect is that of antifeminist propaganda, correct? So maybe this is just a miss either way. There must be some way for her to make it more obvious she’s doing satire, right? Perhaps a “/s” after every line?

To quote the viral tweet, “Yeah 1965 was a fine song but its politics were a bit iffy. wouldve been way better if at the end Jessie Murph turned to the camera & said "i am liberal feminist now" & then specified shes the exact kind of liberal feminist i am"

Funny Tweets/Other Happenings

Joey Mannarino slandering Spongebob the F*cking Square Pant on the anniversary of the day he was exposed as pretending to be a Black woman. Second lore drop: at one point he was mistaken for Luigi Mangione.

This straight guy who joined Grindr for the body shaming:

Perhaps the weirdest take I’ve ever seen in my life (you’ve been warned.)

This villainous-looking right-wing guy on a Jubilee debate video:

In case you missed it…